Lena Nguyen

Park is the backup psychologist on a mission to explore a new planet, with a strangely smaller-than-usual complement of humans and a lot of androids. When things start going wrong, she falls back on her greater affinity for androids, but they are acting strangely too. Park is presented as neuroatypical, but nobody ever says anything except how weird and offputting she is, which felt wrong to me—even the corporatized, post-ecopocalyptic hellscape would surely remember the lingo if it can also make androids and use FTL travel. Ultimately I didn’t connect with Park any more than she would have with me.… (mer)

I'm mixed on this one. It checks a lot of boxes for me -- space horror/philosophical sci-fi with a central mystery surrounding androids, nightmares, and mysterious recordings that indicate greater mysteries. That intrigue fuels the first third of the book.

After that point, though, a lot of the suspense fizzles out as we spend more time exploring the main character -- Park -- and her backstory. While there's plenty of interesting character work in these sections, it undercuts the main story's tension and deviates greatly from Eos's mystery.

In the end, it doesn't come together quite cleanly for me. I've always been one who's willing to suspend disbelief when reading sci-fi and don't need the science elements to make a ton of sense (just a quick glance at some other reviews here indicates I am in the minority in that respect), but the constant shifts between claustrophobic suspense, existential questions of consciousness, and long chunks of backstory made the story feel more disjointed than I think it was intended to be.… (mer)